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The Harness Is the Thing

scott-fryxell.github.io

101–110 of 131 posts

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#101
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

Large development team... that is exactly the problem. The more effort and code put into it the worse it gets. Peak web was one webmaster per site, doing it by hand.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#102
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

> weird and broken Weird, yes. Broken, I don't think so. Seems to just be a matter of taste.

If it's not rendering as intended across all browsers, I'd call that broken. If it renders as intended and just look bad, that's taste.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a little "what a weird nitpick" then I opened it on FF and yeah... that's awful . Normally I'd just switch into FF reader view when it's that badly done but that doesn't work either.

I looked at it on my out of date FF and it looks fine.

I looked at it on firefox and it looks fine. I wonder why it's off for some people

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Anthropic finally collapses their 50% usage increase at the end of August, I'll definitely be forced to switch my workflow I cancelled my Anthropic subscription until they fix how their models write and it's no longer unbearably annoying and obnoxious. The concise output format is a step in the right direction but I need a few months away from them. Kimi and GLM models on Max reasoning feel pretty close to Fab…

Yes both Opus and Fable’s comment style is truly unbearable. I like the code result but it’s so annoying seeing it reflect our conversation as code comments.

On the flip side, a lot of the reasoning and decision making might have happened in the conversation which is more ephemeral than a comment. A future LLM-age source code repository would store the conversation along with the commit, for future reference by humans or LLMs.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#106
post #76

> Single developer projects can build to the caliber and consistency of large development teams. Yet the simple blog website static page saying that looks very weird and broken on the desktop firefox. How large should be a development team to make proper margins in 2026?

Do large development teams care about Firefox?

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#107
post #68
post #65

I don't understand why no one has tried to make a harness without full shell access yet. It would be so much safer.

Is that the harness' job? It seems to me the best place for sandboxing is at the OS level (i.e. running the harness inside a container with correct access configured).

You want both. The harness and the sandbox do different things.

The harness says "You have access to tool X, Y, and Z, but not A, B, C".

The sandbox says "If you try to use X to access a forbidden resource, I'll prevent you from reaching it".

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#108

One will lose the opportunity to develop domain understanding if they do not get into the weeds of thinking through the problem. I use Claude plan mode to do relatively small changes and even then I find that if I actually try and think through the problem and solve it myself that I find good metaphors that will aid future work, and I will discover tangential issues which are then important to look at.

Do you explicitly ask for metaphors?

I wonder if we need a list of things to tell AI to stay sharp, like this one. Sometimes I tell the model existing design is stupid and then it explains reasoning to me.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> weird and broken Weird, yes. Broken, I don't think so. Seems to just be a matter of taste.

If it's not rendering as intended across all browsers, I'd call that broken. If it renders as intended and just look bad, that's taste.

It's hard to say since the gp didn't specify what they thought was broken.

The overall layout is fairly odd & weird - but it's the same in Chrome & Firefox. There is one technical bug with the main body font-size - it uses some invalid syntax (should be invalid in both Chrome & Firefox) & Chrome seems to be accepting it (against spec). The rule:

  font-size: clamp( 1.125rem, 1.125rem + (1.333rem - 1.125rem) * (100dvw - 24rem) / (80rem - 24rem), 1.333rem );
Firefox drops it & falls back to the default body font, making the article text slightly smaller. But it's definitely not a layout-breaking bug.

Re: The Harness Is the Thing

#110
post #3

Reading this really makes me wish that I had a slightly better workflow. I'm really soley dependent of Fable to the point that I don't use other models, and I've already sort of hit a point where I'm running into usage limits every week. I am really living on borrowed time — when Anthropic finally collapses their 50% usage increase at the end of August, I'll definitely be forced to switch my workflow. When that happe…

The GPTs are just as good and I can trust many tasks to open models. Autonomous coding is best with frontier class models but steered coding is fine with even DeepSeek V4 Flash.
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